Train your fingers for spiritual warfare

Human beings, being sinful, make this world a very scary place. A wise question to ask is how will you respond if, God forbid, you become a victim of violence? All of us have one of three instincts when confronted with such a situation: Fight, flight, or freeze.

Freezing is literally the worst thing you can do. Freeze up, your opponent can do large amounts of damage and take away any advantage you may have had. Running away is a good idea, but it's not always available. The disadvantage to fighting is that you need to know how to do it.

This is where martial arts come into play. Martial arts are not quite like you see in the movies, where the main character knows his stuff and becomes basically invincible. Rather, they are a set of principles and techniques which, if learned, improve your odds of winning a fight, preferably with minimum damage. Some martial arts also involve "conditioning", where the body itself is trained, even slightly altered, to allow maximum damage for a certain technique. No one is a born fighter. A child may be able to throw a punch, knowing full well that hitting the right spot will cause some pain, but ask any soldier, police officer, even a nightclub bouncer, just how hard they train. None of them will tell you they just showed up to class one day and knocked out their instructors in one shot.

The Bible describes a spiritual war, in which there are no civilians. We do not fight with physical weapons (2 Corinthians 10:3-4), but we do need to treat it in a similar way. To freeze in a spiritual war is to be overtaken by heresy, lies, and sin. To run away is an option, but there are only two directions to run. God is in one direction, Hell is in the other. Our only logical option is to fight.

But just as one doesn't become an MMA fighter just by scrapping over Pokemon cards in the schoolyard, one doesn't become a warrior for Christ just by wearing a cross around our neck. Everyone, even unbelievers, have Godly instincts (Romans 1:18-2:16). We have an inherent knowledge that God exists, as is revealed to us by creation itself, and our conscience testifies to us that something isn't quite right.

But what does an unbeliever know of God? As Paul says, "I would not have known sin except through the law." An unbeliever may infer that our reality was created by a supreme being, and they may have some understanding of justice, doing without being told what God would tell them to do, but without God and His law, there is obviously a lot missing.

But as Christians, we have the Lord, and we have His law. With it, we can refine our understanding of Him, allowing us to recognise that which comes from Him, and that which does not. We can see sin for what it is, and we can avoid it. We can convict the world with the knowledge of sin, setting free many of its slaves. This will inevitably irk the slaves who remain captive, and so they will fight us, using trickery, lies, even physical violence to try to stop us from preaching the truth. If we do not study the word, what hope have we? If we don't know Satan's strategies, we may as well send a drunk to take out a terror organisation single handed. This point cannot be emphasised enough: Train your fingers for war. If your nose isn't in the word of God on a regular, preferably daily basis, don't be surprised when Satan flattens it.